This essay explains the rationale behind a willfully
anachronistic creative writing prompt: if one of the British Romantics were
alive today, how would he or she craft a literary response to 9/11 and the
ensuing War on Terror? Instead of asking what makes the twenty-first-century
experience of terror new, my assignment encourages students to approach today’s
affective environment through the medium of British Romantic literature. The
following discussion offers a pedagogical framework and theoretical
justification for inviting undergraduates to map the untimely affects that fuse
the contemporary age of terror with its Romantic-era double. The essay concludes
with a survey of exemplary student work.

Affect in the Age of Terror

Daniel BlockKing School

1. In what way does Edward Snowden’s story read like an updated version of
William Godwin’s Caleb Williams? If Samuel Taylor
Coleridge had composed “Fears in Solitude” during the April 2013 manhunt for
the Boston marathon bombers, how would the poem change? How would Ann
Radcliffe dramatize the experience of encountering an unattended bag while
waiting at the airport? These are only a few of the questions that students
considered in their final creative projects for my Hampshire College seminar
on “Literature in the Age of Terror.” [1] The assignment asked them to compose a poem or short narrative that
addresses our contemporary situation in the voice or characteristic literary
style of a Romantic-era writer. Or as I put it in my willfully anachronistic
prompt: if one of the British Romantics were alive today, how would he or
she craft a literary response to 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror?

2. Instead of assigning a traditional analytic essay in which students might
compare the concerns of British Romantic literature and culture with those
of our twenty-first-century moment, I invited the class to write in a
creative mode. The approach let them tap into the affective registers of
historical consciousness that eludes analytic writing, or so Thomas Pfau’s
Romantic Moods leads me to argue. To guide
their efforts, I had everyone transpose their present perspectives into the
idiom of Romantic literature. Imitating the voice of a Romantic-era writer
provided a methodology for estranging one’s affective environment and
thereby making it newly available for analysis. The resulting exercise
enabled students to produce what Jonathan Flatley terms an “affective map”
of the attunement between past and present.

3. The seminar drew on British Romantic literature as a medium for reflecting on
our emotional life in the present. Instead of asking what makes the
twenty-first-century experience of terror new, I posed a different question:
where have we already seen our own range of moods and structures of feeling
before? Toward this end, I led the class through a series of texts—among
them, Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794),
William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), and Jane
Austen’s Persuasion (1816)—that are fascinated by
how impersonal historical forces condition one’s moods, sentiments, and
visceral sensations. These readings served, in turn, as the occasion to put
British anxieties about the French “Reign of Terror” and subsequent
Napoleonic Wars into dialogue with America’s cultural response to 9/11. My
goal was to reframe the age of terror as doubly contemporary, which is to
say both characteristic of the present and simultaneous with the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

4. To borrow Walter Scott’s comment from the “Dedicatory Epistle” to Ivanhoe, I encouraged students to search for the
“extensive neutral ground” between past and present (18). At the same time,
my comparative approach relied on the otherness of Romantic-era literature
to reorient or even disorient our intuitive understanding of things as they
are, to borrow Godwin’s phrase. Oscillating between affinity and alterity,
the seminar routed today’s affective attachments through the foreignness of
the past while simultaneously foregrounding an abiding archive of
intensities that were set into motion by British Romantic literature. My
underling premise was that category of affect could enable a pivot (or
series of pivots) between the Romantic and the contemporary. Consistent with
the notoriously unsettled meaning of the word “affect,” my use of the term
indicates a broad array of felt experiences that warp the cognition of time.

5. The following essay describes the pedagogical rationale behind my course’s
untimely treatment of “Literature in the Age of Terror.” To begin, I explain
my strategies for juxtaposing our contemporary age of terror with its
Romantic-era double. From there, I draw on the work of Thomas Pfau and
Jonathan Flatley to justify my core methodology: constructing a comparative
archive of affective intensities to calibrate the interplay between British
Romantic literature and culture and our post-9/11 moment. The essay
concludes by assessing the writing that my students completed for their
final projects.

I. Teaching the Romantic with the contemporary

6. At the outset of the semester, my first task was to persuade the class that
it makes sense to study late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
literature alongside the contemporary. To establish a connection between
these two seemingly disparate moments, I turned to Marc Redfield’s The Rhetoric of Terror, which argues that

our
specifically political use of the words “terror” and “terrorism” emerged
at the end of the eighteenth century, forming part of the broad
historical phenomenon that literary scholars call romanticism. The
capitalized nominative “Terror” has, of course, a historiographical
referent: it designates more or less the period between the fall of the
Girondins (June 1793) and the fall of Robespierre (July 27, 1794 or 9
Thermidor). (72)

To Redfield’s point, the Oxford English Dictionary cites Edmund Burke and Helen Maria
Williams as among the first to introduce the word “terrorist” into the
English language circa 1795 as a pejorative label for violent political
actors (“Terrorist, n. and adj”). While Redfield acknowledges that “we
obviously no longer mean quite the same things by ‘terrorist’ that Burke
did,” it is nevertheless fair to say that British anxieties about the French
Revolution crystalize emerging notions about terror, terrorism, and
terrorists (73).

7. Building on this point, I invited students to compare our current
geopolitical situation with that of the Romantic authors we were reading.
For instance, I called their attention to the time that elapsed between
William Wordsworth’s travels in France during the early 1790s and his
eventual description of those experiences in the 1805 Prelude. What does Wordsworth’s belated reflection on the
French Revolution have to teach us about our own evolving response to the
trauma of 9/11, I asked? Likewise, I proposed that the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan offer a twenty-first-century parallel for the Napoleonic Wars
that contextualize Jane Austen’s Persuasion. In
this light, Austen’s novel provides an opportunity to consider the personal
costs of the protracted military conflicts that define our moment.

8. To complement the discussion, I introduced students to scholarship that
implicitly or explicitly affirms Romanticism’s bearing on the present. We
began the semester by considering Terry Castle’s thought-provoking
observations about the continuity between visual representations of 9/11 and
the history of art that finds sublimity in scenes of destruction. Through
John Barrell’s account of the British obsession with imagining political
violence during the mid-1790s, we saw the makings of twenty-first-century
arguments both for and against government surveillance and other
anti-terrorism measures. Jan Mieszkowski’s analysis of Coleridge’s “Fears in
Solitude” prompted a conversation about the patriotic rhetoric that followed
9/11 and the Boston marathon bombing. What David Clark describes as Kant’s
wariness about celebrating military victory also raises hard questions about
the riotous celebrations that took place on American college campuses
following the May 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden.

9. All of these conversations reinforced the point that Romanticism functions as
an anachronism in Jerome Christensen’s (or for that matter, Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s) sense of the term: namely, a “potent icon of the past’s
incapacity to coincide with itself, to seal itself off as a period or epoch
or episode with no or necessary consequences for our time. Anachronism is
the herald of the future as yet unknown” (3). Christensen’s formulation
usefully challenged the class’s tendency to assume that the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries are over and done with. Instead, he suggests that
Romanticism cannot be walled off behind the perfected closure of the past.
As with all writing, the definitive meaning of British Romantic literature
has yet to be written; its history remains in process and open to future
reinterpretation.

II. Creative imitation assignment

10. In keeping with the seminar’s embrace of anachronism as a strategy for
bringing British Romantic literature into the present, while simultaneously
filtering contemporary life through the otherness of the past, I gave
students a purposefully anachronistic prompt for their final assignment: if
one of the British Romantics were alive today, how would he or she craft a
literary response to 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror? The challenge was
to imagine how Ann Radcliffe, for example, might react to our own time. The
unorthodox prompt invited the class to compose a creative work that
addresses the repercussions of 9/11 in the voice or characteristic style of
a Romantic-era writer. But why ask students to write in a creative mode
instead of composing a traditional, analytic essay? Furthermore, how does
literary imitation give students a fresh perspective on the present? What’s
to be gained by using Romantic literature to remediate our contemporary
situation?

11. My response to the first question expands upon arguments put forward in
Thomas Pfau’s Romantic Moods. In light of Pfau’s
discussion, I take the view that creative writing makes it possible for
students to tap into the affective registers of historical consciousness
that cannot quite be put into propositional statements. Drawing on Kant and
Heidegger, Pfau theorizes what he terms the mood of history, which
“speaks—if only circumstantially—to the deep-structural situatedness of
individuals within history as something never actually intelligible to them
in fully coherent, timely, and definitive form” (7). In Pfau’s account, mood
channels the latent force of historical events that otherwise elude
conscious understanding. Rather than look to “what may be logically verified
and discursively represented as knowledge,” Pfau contends that history’s
power makes itself felt on a visceral level. Indeed, Pfau maintains that an
affective understanding of one’s historical condition cannot be properly
represented or pinned down (10). To adapt a remark from Favret, mood “offers
up symptoms of a history not entirely possessed” (146). Applying Pfau’s
discussion to my own pedagogy, I deemphasized assignments that required
students to explicitly define their historical situatedness in favor of
offering creative writing as a practice that let the class access an
otherwise inchoate spirit of our age.

12. If anything, college-age students in 2016 are primed to reflect on the
affective tenor of historical experience. After all, they were only in
kindergarten or first grade—five or six years old,—when the World Trade
Center and Pentagon attacks occurred. Experiencing 9/11 and its aftermath
from a child’s perspective gives today’s young people an intuitive
understanding of the visceral yet elusive force of historical events that
are felt more than understood.

13. But why should my class’s efforts to mobilize the affective dimension of
historical consciousness take the form of a literary imitation, as I
stipulate in my assignment? Building on Jonathan Flatley’s notion of Affective Mapping, I argue that the work of emulating
a historical literary style can estrange one’s affective environment while
simultaneously activating the felt relation between past and present.
According to Flatley, affective mapping serves as “a technology for the
representation to oneself of one’s own historically conditioned and changing
affective life” (7). The procedure works through self-estrangement:

By this term [self-estrangement] . . . I mean a self-distancing
that allows one to see oneself as if from outside. But I also mean
estrangement in the sense of defamiliarization, making one’s emotion
life—one’s range of moods, set of structures of feeling, and collection
of affective attachments—appear weird, surprising, unusual, and thus
capable of a new kind of recognition, interest, and analysis.
(80)

Affective mapping entails a depersonalization of the moods,
sentiments, and visceral sensations that are commonly taken as the hallmark
of selfhood. In order to decouple affect from subjectivity, Flatley invokes
the specifically aesthetic device of defamiliarization. [2] As with Pfau, Flatley contends that
literary writing has the capacity to reframe one’s affective makeup as
other, or not one’s own, and hence render it freshly available.

14. To give Flatley’s discussion a concrete pedagogical application, I asked my
classes to imitate a Romantic-era author on the syllabus. On the one hand,
doing so made our “now” resemble the otherness of a “then.” On the other
hand, the reverse is also true, in that any movement away from our “own”
moment and into the Romantic period eventually makes a circuitous return to
the moods and affects that define the present as much as the past. Through
their writing project, students hereby produced maps or mappings in the
sense of calibrating the resonance between Romanticism’s structure of
feeling and our contemporary mood. As Flatley aptly observes, “we never
experience an affect for the first time; every affect contains within it an
archive of its previous objects” (81). My goal was to provide students with
a framework for charting the age of terror that inflects both the Romantic
and the contemporary.

III. The affect of uncertain times

15. The result was a wealth of thought-provoking work examining what Mary Favret
describes as the affect of everyday war. Students gravitated to Austen’s
Persuasion, Godwin’s Caleb
Williams, and Radcliffe’s Mysteries of
Udolpho as touchstones for mapping the changing contours of
daily life in the aftermath of 9/11. Channeling an array of affects that
ranged from the banal to the phantasmatic, regret to dread, curiosity to
paranoid anxiety, the class used their creative writing to investigate the
feeling of being adrift in uncertain times. In the double sense of that last
phrase, my students’ projects suggested that the War on Terror has
disoriented their sense of time and destabilized their sense of
certainty.

16. To understand how students went about capturing the echoes of war in everyday
life, consider the work of Hillary Lynch, who rewrote Coleridge’s “Fears in
Solitude” as if it were composed during the April 2013 manhunt for the
Boston marathon bombers. Aptly retitled “Fears in Collective Solitude,”
Lynch’s poetic imitation explores the strange time that Bostonians spent
“sheltering in place”:

They all wait alone, together, breath held.

Sitting in a unique situation

Contemplating on what should ne’er be thought.

A day off, not by choice, is a strange sight,

Dogs stop barking, kids stop laughing, silence.

Blooming flowers falter without water,

Facing towards the sky, looking for answers. (unpublished
essay)

Where Coleridge’s original poem contends that the threat
of war has a pernicious influence on public discourse, Lynch underscores the
similarly far-reaching impact of an actual terror attack, which reverberates
out from the scene of carnage to radically disrupt the ordinary routines and
daily rhythms of an entire country. According to Lynch, the collective
terror of “wait[ing] along, together, breadth held” has a visceral intensity
that distantly echoes the physical damage wrought on Boylston Street. What
Favret says about Austen’s Persuasion applies
equally well to Lynch’s Coleridgean rendition of the Boston bombings: both
“reveal the everyday not as a zone of peace in contrast to a distant war,
but as the unspectacular register or correspondent of wartime” (154). Dogs
go quiet, children fall silent, personified flowers wither; the mundane
becomes uncanny. Such is the unspectacular yet palpably affecting reality of
a terror attack.

17. The spectacle of war has no less of an effect on the phantasmagoria of our
emotional lives, or so student Rae Purdom holds. Specifically, Purdom offers
a Radcliffean meditation on the medium of television news, which
simultaneously reports distant conflicts and evokes the ghostly presence of
a lost love one. Purdom takes her inspiration from the scene in which Emily
St. Aubert returns to the library of her recently deceased father. Coming
upon her father’s armchair and an open book by one of his favorite authors,
“the idea of him rose so distinctly to [Emily’s] mind,” writes Radcliffe,
“that she almost fancied she saw him before her” (95). In Purdom’s version,
the familiar easy chair faces a television tuned to CNN. As the stream of
martial images washes over her, Purdom’s young protagonist, Jessica, recalls

watching Apocalypse Now with her [dead]
mother, who would have sat in this armchair and played gently with
Jessica’s hair to soothe her and keep her grounded in the safety of
home, far from the threat of imminent violence, as the [television]
announcer intoned the words, “guerilla warfare,” and Jessica felt the
absence of her mother’s hand tousling her hair. (unpublished essay)

In keeping with what Terry Castle describes as that
characteristically Radcliffean tendency to “spectralize” the dead or absent
as “an image . . . on the screen of consciousness itself,” Purdom uses the
medium of the television to frame the ghostly intersection between
geopolitical conflict and personal loss (“Spectralization” 237).
Specifically, Purdom brings Jessica’s visceral encounter with the felt
“absence of her mother’s hand tousling her hair” into alignment with the
ambient grief of watching war from a distance.

18. Another distinctive feature of Purdom’s efforts to map the resonance between
home life and a war zone is the gesture of conflating Vietnam, 9/11, and the
“threat of imminent violence” into one long, interminable conflict. Purdom’s
anachronistic thinking is just one example of the class’s broader interest
in the affect of broken time. Fellow student Michael Samblas makes the point
explicit in noting that like contemporary Americans, the characters of
Austen’s Persuasion are caught between regretting
the past and dreading the future:

Ever since the September 11
attacks, we have been constantly looking back at that momentous event,
and allowing it to define our society to this day. We constantly refer
to the time we live in as “post 9/11” and observe the anniversary of the
event every year. This is in keeping with Austen’s themes of living in
the past . . . [Having said that] our obsession with the past
seems to stem more from a fear of having to repeat it. Austen’s
characters, on the other hand, are actively trying to
relive these moments that they keep reflecting back on. (unpublished
essay)

Just as Anne Elliot’s life stagnates during the almost
eight years since she ended her brief engagement with Captain Frederick
Wentworth and he went off to war, our “post-9/11” era likewise seems to
hover around the recent past, Samblas astutely observes. The hallmark of
our—and Anne’s—belated temporal condition is captured in the fear and/or
fantasy that the past is about to repeat itself.

19. Renata Anuhea Sebstad’s imitation of Austen raises the same issue. In her
short story, Sebstad dramatizes a mother’s anxiety about a son who is
stationed at the military base in Fort Hood, Texas. The Austenian element
can be found in Sebstad’s choice to begin her story shortly before the first
Fort Hood shooting incident of November 2009 and end just prior to the
second mass shooting, which took place in April 2014. Much as Austen’s
audience knew that Anne Elliot’s concluding “dread of a future war” would
soon become a reality, Sebstad invites her reader to anxiously await an
event that has not yet taken place within the diegetic universe of the
narrative, thereby validating the protagonist’s overwhelming sense of
foreboding. Through the modalities of apprehension and unease, both
protagonist and reader intuit that the linear advance of time bends back on
itself to form an untimely cycle of violence.

20. Ben Socolofsky picks up the thread again in adopting Radcliffe’s distinctive
style of haunted consciousness to evoke the spectral afterlife of 9/11.
Reimagining St. Aubert as a casualty of the World Trade Center collapse,
Socolofsky follows his daughter, Emily, through the subsequent months of
mourning. Of particular interest is Socolofsky’s dramatization of Emily’s
post-traumatic encounter with the “Tribute in Light” art installation, which
periodically projects two columns of light skyward from the former World
Trade Center site. Unable to believe her eyes, Emily briefly wonders whether
the Twin Towers are about to collapse all over again—a sense of déjà
vu reinforced by a subsequent encounter with a
doppelgänger of her dead father. Like Sebstad,
Socolofsky explores the recursive temporality of life post-9/11 though the
eerie affect of its uncanny repetitions.

21. Even as a number of students sought to elaborate on Favret’s claim that the
affect of everyday war “eludes the usual models for organizing time such as
linearity, punctuality, and periodicity,” others found that their experience
of uncertain times did not raise issues of temporality so much as emphasize
their sense of uncertainty (11). For one, Teddy S. Miller used Caleb Williams as a vehicle for experimenting with the
affect of uncertainty. His piece tells the fictional story of Adael Goldman,
a character charged with watching over the shrouded body of Osama bin Laden
until it is interred at sea. Like Godwin’s protagonist, Caleb Williams,
Adael is consumed by both curiosity and paranoia. On receiving strict orders
not to look underneath the corpse’s shroud, Adael becomes obsessed with
verifying the identity of the body with his own eyes. At the same time,
Adael is unnerved by nagging questions about why he has been left alone with
the dead man in the first place and whether he might be under some form of
surveillance.

22. The tension between curiosity and paranoia comes to a head in the conclusion
of Miller’s short story, which describes the thought process behind Adael’s
resolution to keep bin Laden’s body covered:

Not once, even when I
held the body in my hands did I allow the veil to slip off and reveal
the identity of the man beneath. In doing so I sentenced myself to live
the rest of my life in uncertainty, with the only thing that could make
me believe in truth again lying at the bottom of the sea. (unpublished
essay)

Without attempting to reproduce Godwin’s plot, Miller
emulates the dynamic of the novel’s original courtroom ending, in which
Falkland never confesses his guilt and Caleb’s accusations remain
unverified. As Pfau notes about Godwin’s original ending, “nothing ever
offers extrinsic and objective confirmation for Caleb’s key hypothesis
regarding Falkland’s guilty past” (140). The point applies equally well to
Miller’s conclusion, in which the protagonist fails to confirm bin Laden’s
ultimate fate and consequently descends into paranoid uncertainty.

23. Dominic Poropat’s imitation of Radcliffe’s Udolpho
achieves similar results by using the device of the “explained supernatural”
to prolong doubt and elicit anxiety. In Poropat’s hands, Radcliffe’s
much-derided trope becomes a recurrent motif of everyday life post-9/11. To
make the point, he dramatizes the experience of a young woman, who
encounters an unattended bag while waiting at the airport. After the manner
of Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Poropat’s Radcliffean
heroine imbues a commonplace object with supernatural powers and dread
import. But unlike Austen, however, Poropat does without parody. In the era
of “see something, say something” when everything is simultaneously a
potential threat and nothing to be concerned about, Poropat intimates that
we have little cause to mock the Radcliffean heroine’s tendency to
overreact. His short story makes the point that 9/11 has introduced an
element of anxious uncertainty into what we see and how we hear.

24. Despite Austen’s sendup of Udolpho, Poropat implies
that we have all become Radcliffean subjects whose exaggerated suspicions
and unsubstantiated fears are no laughing matter. When Poropat’s protagonist
finally summons the courage to open the suspicious bag, it contains “nothing
more than a few mundane travel items,” which she hands over to the lost and
found. “Thirty minutes later,” Poropat concludes, “she boarded her plane and
forgot all about that old, cracked leather bag.” The anticlimactic
denouement works in part because 9/11 seems to have
restored the visceral force of Radcliffe’s much-derided techniques for
creating suspense. Paradoxical though it may sound, Poropat succeeds at
capturing the specifically historical potency of Udolpho’s “explained supernatural” circa 1794 by
bringing the trope into the twenty-first century. The resulting exploration
simultaneously modernizes Radcliffe and backdates our present-day anxieties
about the omnipresent yet unspecified threat of terrorism.

IV. Conclusion

25. Poropat’s short narrative shares in the class’s collective effort to map the
affective dimension of life in uncertain times. Mobilizing an array of
affects that ranged from the banal to the phantasmatic, regret to dread,
curiosity to paranoid anxiety, students used their creative writing as a
vehicle for tapping into a tacit sense that the “War on Terror” has unmoored
their sense of time and left them adrift in doubt. To do so, the class
embraced anachronism. By addressing the legacy of 9/11 in the voice or
literary style of a writer from the syllabus, students navigated the double
contemporaneity that makes Romanticism both characteristic of the present
and simultaneous with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In
the process, students began to channel the visceral power of historical
experience that cannot quite be named.

Castle, Terry. “The Spectralization of the Other in the Mysteries of Udolpho.” The New Eighteenth
Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, edited by
Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, Methuen, 1987, pp. 231–53.

Notes

[1] Thank
you to the students enrolled in the Spring 2014 course I taught at
Hampshire College: Taylor Carlson, Nikolas Costello, Hillary Lynch,
Christian May, Teddy S. Miller, Dominic Poropat, Rae Purdom, Michael
Samblas, Renata Anuhea Sebstad, Ben Socolofsky, Sofia (last name
withheld), and a student who wishes to remain anonymous. I am also
grateful to Kate Singer for commenting on a draft of this essay as well
as L. Brown Kennedy and Marc Redfield for their input on the seminar.
BACK

[2] For a seminal discussion of this technique, see Viktor
Shklovsky’s “Art as Device.” BACK